Sun Life Moves Collaboration Forward with Workplace

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Sun Life Financial is working towards integrating their communication across the company. Recently they have made a large step towards this by adopting the powerful internal social media tool created by Facebook. Sun Life is in the process of rolling out the use of Workplace by Facebook.

Many businesses have difficulty with communication among different departments and the Workplace solution aims to minimize these challenges. Workplace embraces features in social media that are growing in popularity across many platforms, like live-streaming of video which will make remote meetings easier as well as allow senior executives to reach employees with broad messages with ease.

Workplace functions very similarly to the Facebook that most of us are familiar with. It has a newsfeed that tries to show relevant content to the user. It has groups where you can share information that is relevant to a team, which will hopefully eliminate the need for many meetings that stifle productivity. The closed groups, or invitation only groups, will also aid in building a cohesive team especially if each team member doesn’t work in the same office.

One feature that is part of Workplace is the chat function. Simon Austin, Director of Digital Optimization at Sun Life, is looking forward to this rolling out company wide. It will replace the old internal chat system that did not function very well on mobile devices. Another feature Simon is looking forward to, is that he will be able to see the whole history of a chat rather than begin a new chat each time, which is the way it was with the old system. (S. Austin, personal communication December 4, 2017)

Social media is moving towards the fully collaborative information-sharing ideal of the Internet with enterprise solutions like this. I’m sure there will be growing pains as platforms like Workplace gets integrated into different businesses and industries but it is progress.

Lessons for Others

Even though Sun Life is a conservative company it is still looking to adopt innovations in communication and collaboration. Not only does using something like Workplace have positive day-to-day practical applications, it can also be something that demonstrates to new prospective employees that they are moving with the times. As the younger generation moves out of university and into the full-time workforce, there will be an expectation of social media being fully integrated into their working life.